Nicole Noel's List: Open Access Publishing

• Prices for traditional journals have increased to the point where even large libraries have had to cancel hundreds of subscriptions.
• • Grad students in particular are harmed by author fees. Very difficult for them to pay to publish.
• • Myth 2: All OA journals require publication fees that authors must pay themselves. In fact, 67 percent of OA journals charge no publication fees, and most that do charge fees waive them for authors of limited means. Finally, some funding agencies and institutions pay these fees to assure the widest possible readership.

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• In recent years, many countries have implemented legislative mandates that require researchers who accept public grants to make their published research results freely available online within a reasonable time period.  While Canada has lagged, a growing number of funding agencies, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Cancer Society, and Genome Canada have adopted open access policies.
• Yet despite nearly $3 million in annual taxpayer support from those three sources alone, most university presses have opposed open access strategies.

• Some scholars worry that electronic journals are likely to be less permanent than printed journals.
• Publishing a printed version of an electronic journal seems to be the easiest way to assuage scholars' fears. Ms. Fisher says MIT Press commissioned a survey of computer scientists last year to find out why they were not submitting articles to the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science. Two-thirds of those who answered said they would be more likely to submit papers to an electronic journal if it also had a print version.

  • Belief that print=permanence
• their applications for tenure would be stronger on the basis of publication in print journals that were better known,
• The editors of some electronic journals say one way of encouraging submissions is to forge ties with on-line archives of papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed.

• Journals that are not backed by a publisher may not have the resources to beat the bushes for submissions. For example, the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, an electronic-only publication based at the Open University, in Britain, received about a dozen submissions last year, says Simon Buckingham Shum, one of the journal's editors and a researcher at the university's Knowledge Media Institute. But he and the rest of the journal's editors, all of whom are volunteers, haven't had the time this year to solicit manuscripts aggressively. Without a publisher to maintain the journal's visibility, submissions to it have dropped off, he says. "When we get busy, the journal suffers."

   

  Another crucial factor is whether an electronic journal is included in the indexes →  that are popular with academics in a given field. If the journal is not indexed, scholars may never find papers it has published that are relevant to their research, and other researchers will not be interested in submitting work to it.
• • Much depends on the editors actively seeking submissions.
• Another crucial factor is whether an electronic journal is included in the indexes that are popular with academics in a given field. If the journal is not indexed, scholars may never find papers it has published that are relevant to their research, and other researchers will not be interested in submitting work to it.

  • Importance of indexing.

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• Over all, the biggest barrier was the lack of money to pay the publishing fees asked by open-access journals, followed by the perception that OA journals are not of good quality.
• Because publishing charges were mentioned as the largest problem, the survey researchers asked scholars who had published at least one open-access article what they had to pay. Just over 50 percent said there was no charge. At the other end of the spectrum, nearly 10 percent said they had to pay fees ranging from $1,350 to $4,100.